Quotes About Relevance

It really doesn't pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you, because it's unlikely they will delight you now.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything – It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked.

All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.

New Rule: People on reality shows have to quit saying, You either love me or you hate me. There's actually a third option: not giving a shit about you.

New Rule: If one of your news organization's headlines is about who got kicked off Dancing with the Stars last night, you're no longer a news organization. Sort of like, if you were on Dancing with the Stars last night, you're no longer a star.

It seems like once people grow up, they have no idea what's cool.

But Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it.

Consequences must outweigh probabilities

We are so scared of losing everything that doesn't mean anything.

Writers used to be treated (except for the few brand name authors) as the bottom rung of the food chain.  We were interchangeable parts.  We're not any more.  All those people between us and our readers (agents, editors, publishers, book reps, bookstores) are the ones whose jobs are in danger.

Only the superfluous is sordid

yes, the bluffer should know that being an online 'influencer' is a real job, and that sound you can hear is a legion of long-deceased school careers officers spinning in their graves; no, being an online influencer almost certainly not what Dale Carnegie had in mind when he wrote How To Win Friends and Influence People)

Don't go to eighth grade...don't talk about something old...don't bring up old memories that have nothing to do with who we are now. THIS is all that matters! TODAY.

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure.

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all.

I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment...

He was accustomed to paying measurable heed only to those details that bore upon him most directly.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one's own, regardless of what other people think of the book 2) to a certain extent, because it is something one 'ought to have read' but one must be quite clear this why one is reading.

What's the use of asking for an evening paper? You know as well as I do, at this distance from London Nobody's likely to have this evening's paper.

Information that fits with everything else we know has a leg up on feeling true. Just

What has that to do with the price of peas in Persopolis?

You no longer know, amid all this, if what hurt still matters— — Tarjei Vesaas, from "Between Blue Shadows," Through Naked Branches: Selected Poems of Tarjei Vesaas (Black Widow Press, 2018;first published 2000)

It is intuitively plausible that if something has endured for centuries, there must be something in it. But on that logic, there must be something in slavery and the inequality of women.